


Fighting Back

by IncomingAlbatross



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Episode: s01e19 Dreamscaperers, Gen, Minimal editing, Season 2 spoilers, Stan's weird mental abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 07:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17503886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncomingAlbatross/pseuds/IncomingAlbatross
Summary: An attempt at Stan's POV during the bulk of "Dreamscaperers," from Bill entering his mind through the end of his scene with Dipper.(PLEASE NOTE: Despite this being a Dreamscaperers tag, it contains significant spoilers for the first half of Season 2, up to/including Ep 12.)





	Fighting Back

**Author's Note:**

> First Gravity Falls fic, inspired by Stanuary 2019 Week 3: Dreams.

_"No! No, I'm sorry!"_

 

Stanley felt his muscles move without his input, repeating that stupid, stupid push even as he screamed to take it back. His cries changed nothing, though--Ford still flew into that nightmare-blue light, staring back at him with wide eyes of terror and betrayal.

 

"No, no, no!" he repeated, flailing to get to him, to change  _something_ \--but he couldn't do anything, as immobile now as he'd been the first time.

 

What was the point of being a lucid dreamer if he couldn't  _change_  anything?

 

"Stanley! Stanley, do so--"

 

A searing blue light overwhelmed everything-- _everything--_ in sudden, blazing pain.

 

Stanley found himself jolted out of the dream, but not out of sleep--instead, he hung in the pain-blanked whiteness of his unconscious, trapped in his own mind.

 

"What the--"

 

_Danger! Threat! Pain!_ the deepest parts of him screamed. He pulled himself together--he  _knew_  to listen to his gut, after all these years--and gritted his teeth to register the warnings' urgent cause.

_There was something in his head._

 

He didn't think about how he could tell--in his still half-dreaming state, he just  _did._  There was something glaring and poisonous inside his mind, trailing wrongness like acid in its wake.

 

_Can't let it find me,_  he realized,  _can't let it find anything but especially not me,_ and instinctively he pulled/darted/ _moved,_  because this blankness was no cover at all, and found himself surrounded by--

 

_"Wait up!"_ his brother's voice laughed breathlessly.

 

He laughed, throwing a teasing grin over his shoulder. "You should  _keep_  up!"

 

Shore and sea and sun. The glee of discovery. Running across the pebbly beach in the summer heat, his partner always in arm's reach.

 

This was better. This was safe. This was  _right._  He sank into the flow of these moments. . .

 

But the acid-bright invader was still there, moving through the parts of his mind he wasn't using right now.

 

_What if it finds something it shouldn't?_  (The portal--his name--the past--his guilt--)

_What if it finds Ford?_

 

Ford was hidden in the most guarded depths of his memories--but it had been a lot more stirred up this summer than it had before. Just by being around, those kids were breaking the locks.

 

He had to fix that.

 

_"_ Kings--of--New Jersey! Kings--of--"

 

With a wrench, he pulled himself free of the memory, into something less absorbing.

 

He stayed in his memories-- _camouflage,_  his instincts whispered, because if there was already a  _him_  in the picture how could anybody tell the difference?--but from inside the memories of empty days and quiet nights, he focused on his  _other_ memories, on the shape of his mind.

 

He buried his real secrets deep and hid the entrances, and then hid the entrances  _to_  the entrances. Everything else important (Soos) (the kids) (all those  _feelings_  that would shatter his image to smithereens and turn into ammunition if anyone found them in the open) got hidden too, only a layer or two above what he figured would be his Mind Basement. A minute's thought (literally--ha!) filled his surface-level " _Top Secret"_ departments with all the embarrassing stuff he'd pulled out to freak the kids during that stupid Troothache Incident. And then everything-- _everything--_ got twisted and turned into a labyrinth that would've made David Bowie green with envy (if you could tell under all that makeup).

 

The thing was still there, of course, still wandering around. he didn't even really know  _why_  it was there. But his mind was as defended as it was gonna get now. Now he just had to . . .

 

Um. What next?

 

Stan paused. He didn't really know what to do next . . .

 

. . . Keep moving.

 

Yeah. That'd work.

 

( _You can't run forever,_  something in him whispered, but he dismissed it with the ease of long practice. He didn't  _have_  to do it forever, after all--just keep moving long enough to get a step ahead.)

 

(He ignored the fact that he'd never in his life gotten ahead in  _anything_  until he'd been forced to hold still first.)

 

He ducked and moved from memory to memory, weaving between them, careful to leave no traces behind--

 

And then he felt something new.

 

Something opened on the fringes of his mental landscape, and suddenly three other presences appeared. And--though these presences being  _here_  felt weird and unfamiliar, given that they were in somehow  _in his head_ \--they themselves weren't unfamiliar at all. On the contrary, he would know them anywhere.

 

One, warm and steady and unconquerably cheerful-- _Mr. Pines, dude!_  One, burning with determination, protective and anxious with a stubborn edge of anger-- _Stan, c'mon!_ One, bubbly and effervescent, bright with self-assured affection for everything in sight-- _Don't be silly, Grunkle Stan!_

It was his family. Somehow, they'd come in after him.

 

And--even as the poison zipped through his mind to meet and clash with them--Stan found himself relaxing at the realization.

 

The kids could save the day, he knew, if they really needed to. They'd beaten the wax creeps, after all, hadn't they? And Gideon, and the Summerween Trickster, and who knew what else that he'd missed hearing about. Nothing could take down Mabel and Dipper when they were teamed up-- _definitely_ not if Soos was with them too. They'd get around where he couldn't right now, find that acid-thing, and throw it the heck outta his head.

 

Heck, now that they were here, it felt less like an emergency than like a free show. 

 

Though he still didn't know what was going on . . .

 

He winced, as a new shock of the glaring-bright pain went through his head. Okay, there had to be  _some_  way he could make this go faster.

 

_Make things harder for_ that _,_ _at least, to start with._

He concentrated, pulling on all his long experience with deliberately  _not_  cooperating with jerks over the course of his life.  _Don't do what it wants, don't do what it wants . . ._ He focused on that alien presence with the same stubborn dislike he'd give a Northwest, or Gideon, or any one of the people he'd known all his life that thought they could make him do  _anything._

_This is_ my _head and_ my _life and trying to change that'll be harder than pulling teeth, you magical freak._

 

He felt his mind stiffen into resistance against the  _thing,_  doors locking, corridors of thought freezing into immobility.

 

_There you go._

 

But . . . there were other people here too. People on his side. This wouldn't affect them, but . . . 

 

Could he do the opposite?

 

Doing his best to ignore the enemy, he switched focus to the other three . . . or. Five now? He didn't feel anyone else come in . . .

 

Oh. Okay. Those two were extensions of  _Mabel's_  mind, judging by their feel and general . . . aura (bright, simplistic, extremely radical). Okay, that was . . . Well, to be honest, that was  _terrifying,_  but probably not an urgent danger. Certainly not malevolent.

 

Regaining his focus, he concentrated on the three  _real_  people in his head, and thought about working  _with_  them.  _Make room. Bend a little, when they want it. Give them what they need. . ._ It wasn't easy, and with basically anyone else it might have been impossible--he had a lot less experience in that than in the opposite, after all. But with these three? He had something to work with. (Mabel's enthusiastic urging, Soos's stupid puppy eyes, Dipper's dejected looks . . .)

 

_Okay, okay. Show me what you need, what'll help you, and you got it._

 

He felt his mind shift around them, softening and changing to present what their minds were looking for and give them the shortest route.

 

_There we go._  He grinned from his hiding-spot, safe inside the memory of a Mystery Shack tour back when Soos had been sixteen (best exhibit then: the Clock-o-Dial, retired a year later when too many of the clocks that formed its body ran out of batteries).  _Good luck, kiddos._

He kept memory-hopping for a bit, leaving the kids' trek mostly to his subconscious--until, with a jolt, he felt one of his secret memories come to the forefront of his mental map.

 

He focused in again, and--it was Dipper. Of course it was Dipper, looking for memories of himself--who knew why, but his mind had pulled up a whole dang  _collection_ of them. There could be worse things, but he'd  _really rather not_  open his inner thoughts up to his determined twelve-year-old nephew--

 

Aaand he was going in. What a surprise.

 

Stan felt him poke around, catching echoes and run-off from the collection of memories--all recent, he realized, from the last few weeks, probably. Wasn't it around then that he'd started trying to toughen the kid up more? Pushing him to see how much he could really handle?

 

He focused back on Dipper, paying more attention to that fuming anger and how it flared at the memories.

 

. . . Well. He wasn't doing it to make himself popular. But this  _kind_  of anger . . . he might've miscalculated a little.

 

Before he could decide, Dipper found another memory-- _summer day on the porch, Dipper chopping wood like a champ, Soos--_ and Stan realized it didn't matter. The kid was about to find out what he really thought. (He wasn't sure whether he was more relieved or embarrassed.)

 

Dipper opened the memory, listened--

 

\--and Stan reeled in shock as the anger suddenly surged, turning into a blazing storm of  _hurt/shame/betrayal_  that completely consumed the rest of Dipper's presence.

 

That . . . that should _not_  have happened.

 

Dipper left the memory behind before Stan could gather himself together, mind-presence turning cold and cutting-edged in a way he hadn't imagined the twerp capable of till now. Bewildered, Stan poked cautiously at the memory Dipper had found.

 

It was the one he'd thought it was-- _Soos confused, a little worried, him admitting how much of himself he saw in the kid--_ and it didn't feel wrong or confused in any way. It should've been embarrassing for him, maybe, but not the bad kind of embarrassing. He would've thought Dipper would  _like_  knowing Stan was proud of him--if anything, the kid was way too eager for other people's good opinions. 

 

. . . Had he been wrong about that?

 

Nah. There must have been something else wrong. Must've been.

 

Before Stan could talk himself out of it, he dove back in. Not into the memory itself, this time, but zeroing in on the part of his mind Dipper had seen it through. It looked like a hallway, when he got this close, old and worn and with the memory seen through a doorway. . .

 

A doorway with something wrong with the frame?

 

Stan examined it more closely. Then he pulled away, quickly, before he got found out by punching his own dang brain in frustration. There were traces of that poison-acid-invader- _thing_  on the doorframe. It had been there,  _messing_  with Dipper--he could feel how it had gone, now that he was looking from the right side. It hadn't been able to mess with the memory itself,  _no._  It had just  _filtered_  it, instead. A little garbling of some parts, a few volume changes . . . not a big deal, right?

 

_"Wanna know what I really think? . . . The kid's a loser. He's weak! He's an utter embarrassment! I just wanna get rid of him."_

 

_NO._

 

Stan snarled aloud, burning with rage himself at the thought of  _Dipper_ having to deal with that--of protective, snarky, nerdy little Dipper believing that someone  _in his family_  had felt like that about  _him_.

 

"I gotta--I gotta  _fix_  this." He rubbed his head with one hand, barely registering that he wasn't in his memories anymore--he'd pulled himself away to some other, darker space, but that didn't matter right now. He was hidden, that was good enough.

 

And then he felt Mabel flare up in panicked distress, followed a second later by Soos's fearful confusion, and a searing flash of acid-bright  _wrongness_ right next to them. 

 

That thing just couldn't  _stop,_  could it?

 

Something had been wrenched in his mind--not a big thing, but something he could feel just wasn't  _there_  now that he was paying attention, like . . . a missing tooth, or something. Going by Mabel and Soos's reactions, he guessed the  _thing_  had done that--and yep, there it was, trailing  _wrong_  behind it again, but with something that felt like his in its clutches now.

 

It was much harder to figure out than the kids--he couldn't feel anything from it remotely like the stuff he could pick up from them--so he focused on them again.

 

Mabel was burying her fear under determination--good kid--and Soos was following, though he seemed calmer than her. Dipper . . . Dipper was with them, again, but he wasn't  _with_ them.

 

The anger and the hurt and the coldness were all still there, even stronger than they had been before. Even Mabel's upset couldn't pierce Dipper's shell now--that stubbornness was working against her, for once. The kids split up.

 

Stan slammed his fist into his forehead, torn. Two of them (and Mabel's imaginary friends) were going after the  _thing,_  but Dipper was wandering around alone  _and_ enraged now. Who needed to be focused on more?

 

Mabel and Soos felt like they  _thought_  they knew what they were doing, at least . . .

 

A feeling suddenly borne out by experience, as he felt his mind open a memory next to them just in time for whatever the invader-thing had stolen to be  _flung into it_.

 

He didn't know  _that_  could happen--but obviously it could, at least for now. Pulled in by the disturbance, he'd found himself in front of the Bottomless Pit, but now with . . . something _. . ._ falling down it that he did  _not_  think had been there in real life. He hadn't caught what it looked like, but who cared?

 

"Whoo!" he said from within the memory, peering into the pit as smugly as he dared. "Whatever that was, it's gone forever!"

 

Then the door closed again, and he was free to laugh and, reassured, focus back on Dipper.

 

. . . Who was wandering the memories again. Well. Stan could use that.

 

He concentrated, more precisely than he had since this whole mess started. He needed--Dipper needed--one particular memory in the right place, right next to the kid. If Stan could get him to open it, that would be enough.

 

(. . . It had better be enough.)

 

_C'mon, c'mon . . . Why I've been a jerk to Dipper lately. Why I've been hard on the kid . . ._

 

The memory opened. He threw himself into it, determined that it wouldn't give Dipper reason to turn away this time, and force-started it at the most important part.

 

"'He's a loser.' 'He's weak,'" he said in memory. "'I just want to get rid of him.'" He chuckled, trying to lighten the sting for himself and Soos. "Yeah. Those are all things people said about me when I was a boy."

 

The part of him not engaged in the memory felt the startled softening in Dipper's presence.

 

The change as the rest played out--as memory-him explained to Soos, for real this time, why he'd been hard on the kid, what he'd been through himself, and how he  _really_  felt about Dipper--that was even more dramatic. By the end, Dipper's presence was practically glowing, full of surprised pride and relief and . . . Well. Something else, softer, might have been there too, but it hurt a little to focus on that part. So Stan didn't.

 

Anyway. The kid was settled now, happy and relieved and . . . whatever else. Stan's work here was--

 

Dipper was on the memory-porch.

 

Fully present now--just like he had been with the Pit memory--Stan stared at him.

 

He stared back.

 

Stan looked over to the chopping block, just to make sure--yep, there was memory-Dipper. "Whoa, kid," he said, looking at the clearly startled real-Dipper again. "What're you doing  _here?_ "

 

He just stood there, speechless. Huh. He looked pretty normal, for a mental construct or whatever--Stan would've expected Dipper's mental self to look taller, or something. Go figure. Although . . .

 

He laughed. "Nice hole in your chest, by the way. Let's fix that up." He pointed, and with a second's thought Dipper's body mended itself up.

 

(That hole had felt just a little too much like the acid-thing, when Stan looked closely, and like  _heck_  was he letting that thing leave any more marks on his nephew.)

 

Dipper spluttered hilariously--apparently he was really out of his depth in this whole mind thing. Man, Stan didn't think it was that complicated . . . but maybe even the mini-nerd needed a tip or two.

 

"Word to the wise, kid," he said, cutting him off with a chuckle. "We're in the  _mind._ You can do whatever you imagine in here!"

 

How to prove his point . . . Oh, yeah. With  _style._  He grinned, brought a Pitt can out of thin air, and popped it open.

 

Dipper stared, slowly beginning to grin. "Well," he said, and Stan could see the possibilities in his wondering eyes, "how about that?"

 

Then Stan felt a wave of fear--real, unadulterated fear--from Mabel and Soos at the same time, rudely jolting his focus away from the memory for a moment.

 

Dipper didn't notice, apparently picking up whatever was going on with them at the same time. "Oh, my gosh!" he exclaimed, self-reproach sweeping through him. "What am I doing? I gotta stop Bill!"

 

By the time Stan pulled himself fully back into the memory, he'd already dashed out of it--burning with a bright, clear determination now, one absolutely certain of what to do, and why, and how.

 

Stan grinned at the feeling, knowing his twin and friend were as good as saved already. "Huh," he said aloud, taking another drink from the imaginary Pitt. "Fighting back."

 

Maybe the kid didn't have to learn to stand up to all his authority figures. Maybe he just needed a little help standing up to  _actual_  threats.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and/or concrit appreciated! (Especially since I may go over this with significant edits later, when I have more time. I just wanted to post it at least kind of before the end of the week.)


End file.
